Tech and SF are stuck with each other

So we’d better figure out how to get along

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has stepped up with a donation to San Francisco homeless programs.

Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

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Tech and SF are stuck with each other

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Just last week, as you may recall, I noted that San Francisco’s tech scene lacked a clear leader. I suggested that it might be time for Airbnb’s Brian Chesky to step up and take more of a lead on civic issues. Less than a week later — and shortly after the passage of Proposition C, a measure that raises taxes on big businesses in San Francisco — his company has announced a $5 million donation to local homeless programs. Coincidence? Maybe. Or perhaps it’s the beginning of a campaign to raise Chesky’s profile ahead of the company’s expected initial public offering in 2019.

There’s a lot of talk about whether the Bay Area can sustain more growth, whether San Francisco and its other cities simply don’t have room for all the workers tech companies hope to hire. Square and Twitter have made noises about moving out of San Francisco altogether, though that’s more posturing than plan.

The truth is that it is difficult for tech companies to grow elsewhere. Look at Amazon’s decision to split the baby with its second headquarters and plant 25,000-person offices in New York City and Crystal City, Va. The key factor wasn’t the tax incentives or other enticements that localities dangled in front of Jeff Bezos: It was the sheer challenge of hiring 50,000 people with the right skills in a single place.

For better or worse, the city is stuck with its tech economy.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

For most tech companies, that single place remains the Bay Area. And it’s not just for a single factor, like graduates with computer science degrees, though those pour out of local colleges. More nebulous ties ground companies here, like the availability of lawyers who understand tech patents and HR experts who know how to structure stock-option packages. The ease with which engineers, designers and product managers can drift from company to company — often together — is unmatched.

All those factors combine as a gravitational force pulling talent and money to the region. That force causes its own problems, like unaffordable housing, rising traffic and soaring office rents that squeeze out other businesses and residents. The fact that companies are expanding elsewhere even as they grow at home is less of an escape route and more of a relief valve.

Salesforce employee Robert Kastigar works in the new Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

As someone who’s watched the sector grow since the mid-’90s, I’ve come to think of the growth of tech as something like climate change: inexorable and demanding that we adapt to it. The good news is that, unlike the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, tech also brings wealth and creativity that can be enlisted in the fight against these problems.

Tech and San Francisco are stuck with each other, in other words. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can move on to defining what a livable city with a thriving, world-changing industry looks like.

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“I don’t mean this in any kind of xenophobic way, but it’s worth noting that a very large percentage of Google employees are not U.S. citizens.” — Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, arguing without evidence at the WSJ D.Live conference that Googlers protesting the company’s work for the U.S. military did so because of their nationality

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Cisco reports earnings Wednesday. The key question, according to Seeking Alpha: How is the San Jose networking company doing with its transition from selling gear to software and services?

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Owen Thomas is the business editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He supervises The Chronicle’s business and technology coverage. Previously, Thomas was the editor-in-chief of ReadWrite, a technology news site. His digital experience includes serving as the West Coast Editor of Business Insider, executive editor at the Daily Dot, and managing editor of Gawker Media's Valleywag. Before that, he served in various roles at Time Inc.'s Business 2.0 magazine, the Red Herring, and Wired.

Thomas has a bachelor's degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.